One Woman’s Place in Time: Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then

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Jamaica Kincaid is annoyed. She spent 10 years writing a novel about the passage of time and everyone seems to think it’s a roman à clef about her marriage — and a vengeful one, at that. At a recent Manhattan reading at Symphony Space, she introduced her new novel, See Now Then, by explaining (among other things) that it was not about a divorce, that none of the characters in her book obtain a divorce, nor do they talk about divorce, nor does the word “divorce” even appear in the book’s pages. Referring to a particularly exasperating review she said, “It is almost as if the person describing the book has read another book entirely.”

I feel fortunate to have read See Now Then before the press feasted on its autobiographical elements. I’ve read almost everything Kincaid has written and knew enough about her life to recognize that Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the unhappy couple at the center of this novel, were loosely modeled on Kincaid and her ex-husband. I also assumed that the small New England village where Mr. and Mrs. Sweet live was based on Bennington, Vt., where Kincaid lived for many years. But by the time I finished See Now Then, the gossip had burned off and I wasn’t thinking much about Kincaid’s life. Instead, I was in a somewhat altered state as I considered how erratically time passes, with the big slow-moving space of childhood up front and then adulthood rushing past. See Now Then also left me thinking about how strange our conception of the past and future is, how we talk about them as if they are somehow vastly different from the present, when both are made up of the moments we are in the midst of living.

If my impressions sound vague (if not downright pretentious) that’s because See Now Then is a difficult book to write about. It has no plot, there’s nothing to summarize. In some ways it makes sense that journalists have chosen to focus on Kincaid’s biography; it was the only story available. It also makes sense that Kincaid chose to write a domestic novel; she had to anchor her abstract musings in something mundane, like the muck and mire of a failing marriage.

In a recent New York Times profile, Kincaid said See Now Then didn’t come together for her until she thought of the title. The phrase opens the novel, like the beginning of a fairy tale, “See now then, the dear Mrs. Sweet who lived with her husband Mr. Sweet and their two children, the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles…” What follows is a long description of the view from Mrs. Sweet’s window, a view that includes “the house where the man who invented time-lapse photography lived.”

This early mention of time-lapse photography seems significant. We use time-lapse photography to witness the things we can’t see in real time — the blooming of a flower or a tree coming into leaf. Kincaid uses the form of the novel to illustrate the things that Mrs. Sweet could not see in her own life, flipping through the ordinary moments that make up Mrs. Sweet’s mostly sweet existence — moments spent gardening, moments spent nursing her son, moments spent driving her children to school, moments spent in a little room off of her kitchen, writing — to reveal the larger story: that of a disintegrating marriage.

Mr. and Mrs. Sweet are portrayed as an odd match, Mr. Sweet an aristocratic New Yorker, while Mrs. Sweet is an immigrant from a small Caribbean island, an island Kincaid describes as “so small, history now only records it as a footnote to larger events.” Mrs. Sweet fell in love with Mr. Sweet because of his knowledge and his place in world; Mr. Sweet fell in love with Mrs. Sweet for her exuberance and her long legs. Their marriage, it is suggested, was arranged in part to secure Mrs. Sweet’s citizenship in the United States. But it was the birth of their children that truly pushed them into the traditional roles of husband and wife. In her “marriage story,” Mrs. Sweet observes that “without the birth of young Heracles and the birth of the beautiful Persephone we would not be and so become: Mr. and Mrs. Sweet.”

With their primal attachments, children bring the mythic into daily life, and so Kincaid gives Mr. and Mrs. Sweet’s children mythic names. Mr. Sweet adores his beautiful Persephone but is wildly jealous of his son, Heracles, whose strength and passion outmatch his own. Mrs. Sweet dotes on her children, bringing new meaning to the term “domestic goddess” as she knits elaborate baby garments, prepares three-course meals, and grows an extravagant garden. And yet she also disappears into her home office to write, a room to which the children “had no access, not even if they took a boat or a plane or a car or a hike, not at all could they reach her when she was in that room off the kitchen, and then how they loved her, but she was apart from them and only in the world of those sentences.” That Mrs. Sweet often writes about her own childhood when she separates herself from her children is an irony that Kincaid returns to again and again.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Sweet are beholden to their childhoods — Mr. Sweet’s because his was wonderful, and Mrs. Sweet’s because hers was painful. Mrs. Sweet contends with her demons by writing autobiographical fiction; language helps her locate her “true self.” Mr. Sweet is a musician but does not find the same solace in his compositions. Instead he scores a nocturne titled This Marriage Is Dead (alternate title: This Marriage Has Been Dead For A Long Time Now) and tells Mrs. Sweet that he can’t be his “one true self” when he’s with her, that he loves someone else, someone who understands this one true self better than Mrs. Sweet does.

Do we have “a one true self?” Is “the self” the story of a person over time, a kind of narrative, or is it a like a note of music, fixed and unchanging? What effect does intimacy have on the self? What effect does time have? When the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain, how do we live comfortably in the present? These are just a few of the questions raised in See Now Then, questions that could easily come off as rarified but never do, because Kincaid’s story is so grounded in the material. She makes great use of brand names throughout the novel, but doesn’t wield them ironically. Instead she uses them to fix her characters in time and in the landscape. Mr. Sweet gets his jackets from “the Brooks Brothers outlet in Manchester;” Mrs. Sweet’s Laura Ashley nightgown is from a boutique on Madison Avenue; T-shirts for Heracles are “bought from a store called Manhattan, though it was located in a city far from Manhattan.” Kincaid also refers precisely to cultural objects, local and distant landmarks, and even celestial formations. One passage contains references to Beechnut baby food, the coast of Barbados, the Holland Tunnel, Peter Rabbit, and the Magellanic Clouds. The contrast between the names, some grand and some mundane, some strange and some familiar, is jarring and delightful.

At the Symphony Space reading I attended, Kincaid spoke of her own selfhood as something she created when she was younger “for herself.” By this she meant that the person she had become was someone she wanted to become, not someone that anyone else wanted her to become. Her interviewer was Ian Frazier, a friend who has known her for 39 years. He asked her if she could have written See Now Then when she was younger; her reply was complicated. She said that she was mulling over some of the ideas she approaches in See Now Then in her very first piece of fiction, “Girl,” but that she couldn’t express her thoughts fully because of her limitations as a younger writer. “Not to torture my poor title,” she said, “but what I was doing then in that story is the beginning of what ended up here.” She went on to describe the inspiration for “Girl,” which was Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “In The Waiting Room.”

After the reading, I came home and read “In The Waiting Room.” It’s a poem that describes a young girl’s recognition of selfhood, of having an identity that is separate from others, and one that can also be seen and recognized by others. The speaker is terrified by this revelation and reminds herself of her age — her place in time — in order to stop “the sensation of falling off/the round, turning world.” If there is a plot to See Now Then, it is the story of Mrs. Sweet’s efforts to confront her own fear of the “round, turning world” — a fear that can no longer be assuaged by incantations of age and youth. To say that Mrs. Sweet conquers her terror is too pat a summary but by the end of the novel she has reached a kind of equilibrium. It is marvelous to behold.

Hannah Gersen
is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of Home Field. Her short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. Read more at hannahgersen.com or sign up for her newsletter here.

Thanks to President Obama and the Academy Awards, Shepard Fairey and Banksy are household names today. But before mainstream media plastered their work across the world, they’d already done it for themselves, rising to the status of contemporary street art royalty: infamous and rich for making illegal and legal artwork that kids cop and celebrities and curators covet. Both artists would admit, however, that they are just part of a continuum. As Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon, co-authors of The History of American Graffiti, assert in their introduction, “Humans write graffiti.” So true: cave paintings, petroglyphs, and pictographs begat World War II “Kilroy was here” and Bozo Texino scrawls on railcars begat disenfranchised kids “getting up” on any surface they could slick with ink and paint.
Exactly who was the first kid to spread a name or moniker across a cityscape is up for debate, but this book is as close as one will ever get to a definitive answer. A blow-by-blow, regional dissection of graffiti’s proliferation across the United States, relying on first-hand accounts, interviews, mountains of photographs, and a pinch of healthy speculation, Gastman and Neelon have connected the dots to reveal a comprehensive and important story about how doing something as simple as writing your name in a public space grew into a global movement that has left its colorful residue on all aspects of culture, from politics and media to fashion and urban planning.
Common knowledge to those in the know, but perhaps a surprise to neophytes, graffiti as we think of it today started in Philadelphia, not New York. In 1965, yearning for his grandmother’s cornbread while at reform school, Darryl Alexander McCray started writing CORNBREAD on the school’s buildings, vying for attention alongside the names of gangs. Released in 1967, CORNBREAD ran roughshod through North Philadelphia, inspiring others like COOL EARL and KOOL KLEPTO KIDD. Soon, teenagers were canvassing the city with their tags, running in crews, and keeping tabs on other crews operating in different neighborhoods (which eventually led to crews with national chapters, like TKO). KOOL KLEPTO KIDD recalls the first time he met writers from West Philadelphia, “that was really a beautiful feeling because we had been tracking each other for the longest time.”
There is an element of graffiti fueled by conflict – personal beefs, neighborhood disputes, gang rivalries – and while the book does not shy away from these realities, the dominant theme is that kids rallied around graffiti. In fact, as the authors astutely point out, they invented it: “Graffiti can claim something that no other art movement can: it was entirely created and developed by kids.” With the disillusionment fomented by a string of senseless assassinations, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, kids knew that it was up to them to stake their claim in a culture that was both indifferent and inept when it came to bettering the quality of life in the country’s urban centers.
Certainly that is what happened in New York when graffiti really took shape as the city’s finances and national reputation were in a downward spiral. As LIL SOUL 159, a Queens-based writer active in the early 1970s insists, “Any writer will tell you that graffiti tore down the racial barriers of the late 1960s and early 1970s – eradicated them! And you just didn’t see that in New York City until graffiti hit the scene. Once we smelled that ink, we were just writers.” This sense of camaraderie fueled with a dose of healthy competition spawned the highly stylized, audacious lettering that blanketed trains, buildings, billboards, and any other imaginable city substrate so as to spread a name far and wide. Writers prioritized subway lines that covered the most ground. Seeing SUPER KOOL 223 all over the 4 train, which runs between the Bronx and Brooklyn, STAY HIGH 149 decided he had to go bigger and better. This attitude, shared by most writers, resulted in tags evolving from written monikers followed by numbers usually representing streets to more ornate pieces comprising block and bubble lettering, characters, and other visual ornaments.
The same as MTA trains carried a writer’s fame across boroughs, freight trains began to crisscross the county ablaze with the work of writers no longer content to be all-city. The freights let kids who had never been out of state go all-country, spreading graffiti through the suburbs and desolate plains of middle America. While plenty of books have documented the graffiti of New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the primary instigators of these scenes, Gastman and Neelon have dug much, much deeper, covering cities like Chicago and Washington D.C., as well as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, Nashville, Denver, Alburquerque – the list goes on. In doing so they trace graffiti’s development and make the case for it as a true American art form akin to jazz.
In the 1980s, the documentary Wild Style and the book Subway Art played major roles in establishing graffiti as a legitimate art movement; bolstered by its relationship to hip-hop, writers got their first tastes of celebrity and gallery cultures. At the same time, because of the work they did on the streets, the media clumped Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat with writers like DAZE. Neither Haring nor Basquiat considered themselves graffiti artists, but they did help usher in the era of street art. While traditional aerosol tags continued to go up all over the country, and world, new materials and methods were applied to the streets. Posters, stickers, and stencils carried messages, logos, and more formalized characters. Today graffiti and street art thrive; artists travel the world, receive commissions, sell their art for huge sums, and license their work for ads, sneakers, and video games.
But one person’s hero is another’s vandal. Street art remains illegal almost everywhere. Municipalities actively and aggressively buff people’s work. Visit a wall in some city today and it won’t look like it did back in 1979, 1985, 1999, or even 2004. The carvings and paintings of France’s Lascaux caves and the canyons of the American southwest have been preserved as vital visual records of how early humans externalized interior thoughts. But the graffiti in this book has been painted over or chipped away, though it serves as the foundation for a global art movement that is as much about claiming individuality as it is about visual aesthetics.
This is what makes The History of American Graffiti that much more impressive. Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon have gathered the origins of a story that up until now have only existed in fragments. For graffiti fans, pieces of the puzzle will be filled in and the riot of never-before-seen imagery will guarantee that this book is always within reach. Don’t like graffiti? It matters not, as this is a worthy read if you have any interest in late twentieth century America because the world we live in would not look the same if it weren’t for bold, creative kids hell bent on making sure that their presence was recognized by a culture that easily could have forgotten them.

Nick Coleman, a long-time music journalist in the UK, was made aware of his body’s terrible capriciousness when one of his ears stopped working. It left a dull blankness for a while, and then a building cacophony of tinnitus in both ears so severe that balance and concentration became almost impossible. Burdened with what could have been a ruinous impediment, he reaffirms his love of music.

3 comments:

Regarding your comment “If my impressions sound vague (if not downright pretentious) that’s because See Now Then is a difficult book to write about. ” I don’t find your writing pretentious at all. Ambiguous topics are the most challenging of all to write about, and you do so with clarity and vigor. In my “other life” as a former attorney with an interest in improving the quality of legal writing, there’s been a lot of great stuff written about this topic.

Just wanted to pass along a couple of things I thought might interest you:

a.) I’m a huge fan of the British ghost story writer Robert Fordyce Aickman. He was a master, capturing the most strange and elusive states with his language. I believe his pigeonholing in the horror genre has marginalized him, and I think he is one of the greatest short story writers of all time.

b.) Repeating this from my Twitter comment, but my mind has been filled all week with the mind-blowing use of time in a Mad Men episode from last spring called “Far Away Places.” In this episode, time careens back and forth and characters continue to meet again at the same place, with dizzying shifts in action and point of view. Feels like an Escher drawing!

1.I come to review Elif Batuman’sThe Possessed via a compellingly circuitous route.
It is the divine right of interns to make mistakes, or so I keep trying to convince The Millions editor and my boss, the despotic C. Max Magee. Nonetheless, whenever I chance upon a fresh way to humiliate myself, two events occur in rapid succession: first, I wail “No one must know!” and second, I proceed in a frenzy to tell absolutely everyone.
Case in point - the following:
Dear MS. Batuman,
I’m currently interning at the literary website The Millions, for which I occasionally post “Curiosities”... and I recently posted the following:
“At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of HIS 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky...” (emphasis added)
Shortly afterwards, “Alison” posted the following comment: “Elif Batuman is a woman.”
Doom, I thought, for several reasons. First and foremost, I myself do not possess an anglo-sounding name, so to me such mistakes are personal... As waves of shame from cultural insensitivity washed over me, I comforted myself with the fact that I did not make the heteronormative assumption that just because you were on a blind date with a male in your piece, you must obviously be female. So there! I will tell THAT to my detractors...
But doom I thought again, after I spent the better part of the morning trying to gauge the approximate level of your fame and influence online (and thus the approximate size of my gaffe). My research reveals that your level of fame and influence is, in short, high...
Please accept my apologies. I will make amends by reading The Possessed, and by correcting all those who confuse your gender in my presence, forever.
With humility,
Ujala Sehgal
Think this is a hysterical, maladaptive strategy, perhaps? I beg to differ:
Dear Ujala,
Thanks for your kind and entertaining note, and for reposting on The Millions. I do get the gender mistake a lot, and actually find it kind of flattering, since I interpret it to mean that I don’t have a girly style. You must have mistaken me for one of these hard-hitting gay theater writers who are carrying on the tradition of Hemingway and Dos Passos. Re: your unawareness of my tremendous fame and influence, I will forgive you completely if you purchase The Possessed.
Best wishes,
Elif
Through my ecstasy at this new found relationship with someone from the higher literary echelons, and subsequent rapid-fire scheming as to what I might do with this unexpected influx of power, it did not escape my attention that Elif had quietly taken my offer to “read” The Possessed and raised it to a “purchase” The Possessed. Nor could this subtle revision be dismissed as mere oversight on her part through force of habit. Her email actually linked the words “purchase The Possessed” to its Amazon page. She wasn’t playing coy.
2.
Purchase, eh? It is the divine right of interns to be broke, or so I keep trying to tell my friends when I insist they pick up the tab after expensive dinners. But a few days later, after I posted the above exchange on my blog, Elif Batuman linked to my post on her own blog, with some additional commentary:
[...] Naturally, I was delighted by this testament to the virility of my authorial voice, which is evidently such that young people would sooner believe me to be a gay man than entertain the possibility of my not having a penis at all.
Far be it for me to skive off my part in what was now clearly a swiftly escalating literary collaboration. “You drive a hard bargain, Batuman,” I muttered to myself. My condolences to Junot Diaz, whose esteemed book was until then the leading contender in that particular paperback bracket. Counteroffer accepted.
3.
At first I couldn’t find The Possessed in the Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue where I sought it, but the salesperson at the information desk, his eyes lighting up in recognition, walked me purposefully to its spot.
“It’s pretty popular for a book on Russian literature,” he remarked good-naturedly.
“Well, she’s very funny,” I agreed, possibly with an excess of familiarity.
“Oh, do you know her?”
“Well... you know... we’ve corresponded!” I trilled demurely, in a manner suggesting we’d been hand-writing deeply personal letters to each other for years and were practically the best of friends, instead of having emailed exactly once.
I had high hopes that my new purchase would be funny, so I waited until I was on the subway to begin reading. I have a penchant for bursting out in fits of raucous laughter while reading on the subway. It confuses people, but it’s something of a hobby of mine. I also hoped the author (whom I gathered is a smoker from her Paris Review piece) would frequently mention smoking, my other hobby. It is a particular pleasure to light a cigarette (though not on the subway, of course) while reading about someone else lighting a cigarette, sort of like watching the food network while eating.
The humor, as it turns out, did not disappoint. But it could have used a bit more smoking.
4.The Possessed, drawn from Elif Batuman’s articles for the New Yorker, Harper’s, and n+1, recounts her adventures during the seven years she spent in graduate school studying Russian literature. I have always felt a fondness for academia, and, in fact, so consuming was my desire to get a PhD in every available subject that, rather than pick just one, I opted to go to law school, effectively using up my quota of degree acquisition for at least another decade. But Batuman had far less enthusiasm, at first:
It was a received idea in those days that "theory" was bad for writers, infecting them with a hostility toward language and making them turn out postmodern; and what did it have to offer, anyway... Why all that trouble to prove things that nobody would ever dispute in the first place...?
Studying literature, as she describes it, was something that happened to her, rather than the other way around. A series of chance encounters -- a linguistics professor with a deep concern for Martians, a group of writers huddled in a trailer in a New England artists’ colony, an adolescent boys’ "best legs" contest in Hungary, to name but a few -- gently pulled her away from creative writing and toward literary criticism.
5.
Like Batuman, I’ve had some harrowing experiences with contemporary American fiction - particularly short fiction. I can be pretty wary of it. Well-meaning friends who question why I dither endlessly before committing to their book recommendations in this genre are finally treated to a vague “Well, I don’t know if it will be any good...” This does not go over well with the person vouching for the work: “But I’m telling you it’s good,” they seethe, and animosity crackles between us.
If I could pinpoint one moment as the genesis of this (mostly irrational) trepidation, it would be somewhere between 2004 and 2005, when I read The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. (This is not to imply that that collection was considered a shining example, or any sort of example, of the fiction of its time by anyone other than myself). But my disenchantment had been quietly building, and like the proverbial straw, when I read the following few sentences, something inside me just broke:
One wall is covered with taped-up cartoons in black ink and watercolor...
He hands me my wine. And I tell him that his cartoons are beautiful and funny and sad and true.
He smiles.
The description of a thing as “beautiful and funny and sad and true” filled me with such indescribable gloom that it took me years to shake. I was reminded of that feeling as Batuman related the profound “emptiness” she felt upon reading the “Best American Short Stories” of 2004 and 2005 (apparently an epiphanic couple of years for the both of us):
I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns - like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words. The first sentences were crammed with so many specificities, exceptions, subverted expectations, and minor collisions that one half expected to learn they were acrostics, or had been written without using the letter e.
6. But very little of The Possessed is devoted to critique of fiction. Quite the opposite. It’s pure love of Russian literature that fuels Batuman’s adventures that comprise the bulk of the novel. Really, only a mad sort of love could have prompted her to attend a Tolstoy conference in flip-flops and sweatpants while quietly investigating the author’s death, to fabricate a wedding in Uzbekistan, to ask about doorknobs in a St. Petersburg ice castle, to sleep with a diabolically charismatic classmate who transforms her social circle into the cast of Dostoevsky’sThe Demons.
The love of literature crystallizes for many readers when they first encounter a novel they so adore that they think: I wish I could just live inside of it. The Possessed has this desire at heart. Granted, it might be more obvious why Don Quixote felt this impulse for his beloved chivalric romances than why Batuman felt it for the works of Babel, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. But their fantasy is one and the same.
Is seven years of graduate school a more effective means of living inside literature than Don Quixote’s donning an old suit of armor and setting off for adventures with his "squire"? Another question: is it saner?
It’s easy to set these questions aside when drawn into Batuman’s anecdotes, which are told with such deadpan so as to magnify the absurd, or when consuming the literary theory that’s conveyed with such engaging naturalness that one starts believing she is bandying about popular culture. Batuman has the sort of non-fiction voice that not only indicates humor and intelligence but channels it: the reader feels funnier and smarter herself while reading.
But these questions acutely matter to The Possessed, and they in turn transform it from a series of essays and adventures into a novel, into a story, about love and the quest to actualize one’s passions - whether they be Russian literature, chivalric romances, or anything else - through uncompensated devotion. Which is the divine right of all interns and academics.